Hi, I’ve purchased 2 Pi’s and unfortunately they have the same MAC address
I’ve never experienced two devices with the same address before, so I think this must be an error in production somehow and I’m getting in touch with the Raspberry Pi group about it.

Anyway, I was trying to change the MAC address of one of the PI’s to make them work on the same network, but I couldn’t find out where to do it since the normal places like /etc/network/interfaces etc isn’t to be found in the Elk Pi distribution.
I even tried to grep for words that could lead me on the way, but no luck.

Ok, so it seems that I’ve been extremely unlucky getting the one out of 16 million other cards which has the same MAC address as the other Pi I have

So I found several ways to get around this - none of which are working on the Elk distribution
The options include overriding the MAC address in network config files (standard Linux pattern) and setting it on boot time in /boot/config.txt or /boot/cmdline.txt (standard Pi pattern).

The latter works like a charm in Raspbian on the same Pi’s, but not in Elk OS

So where on earth am I supposed to set an override MAC address on Elk ??

Hi @jesper,
you should be able to modify /boot/cmdline.txt. The only thing is that by default we unmount what is /boot on Raspbian for SD card safety.

So you need to first manually mount the first FAT partition, e.g.:

$ sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt
$ cd /mnt

and then you can edit cmdline.txt from there. Be sure to do a sync and unmount the partition before powering off your Pi. You can check the results with cat /proc/cmdline to see if the extra parameter was passed.

Otherwise it seems to be possible to do it also with U-Boot (which we use and Raspbian doesn’t) but you’ll have to mingle around with Yocto and it’s not a trivial task I’m afraid…